A novel way of reading our founding documents and revising them as both law- and nation-building myths.
A searching history of the legal and ideological basis of American identity.
Americans love to tell comforting stories about our foundational documents, writes Roosevelt, a Penn law professor and great-great-grandson of Theodore Roosevelt. The Declaration of Independence, for instance, purportedly enshrines the notion that all men are created equal; of course, that’s not true. Although Thomas Jefferson included a clause condemning slavery—though owning enslaved people himself—the Declaration means all White men are created equal. “Segregation and denying Blacks the vote are perfectly consistent with the Declaration of Independence,” writes the author. The nub of the Declaration, he adds, is that when supposedly free people are oppressed, it is incumbent upon them to rebel. With the arrival of the Civil War, the South was able to invoke that notion as a cause for separation. The result was not just a second revolution, but also a second Constitution, one that in important ways undid the slavery-supporting first Constitution. “We tell ourselves a story that links us to a past political regime—Founding America, the America of the Declaration of Independence and the Founders’ Constitution—to which we are not the heirs,” writes Roosevelt, provocatively. “We are more properly the heirs of the people who destroyed that regime” and who moreover “defeated it by force of arms.” But this second Constitution is contingent and incomplete, allowing for neo-Confederate revivals (Reagan, Trump) thanks to relics such as the Electoral College, “a legacy of slavery, which seems increasingly likely to stop a majority of Americans from electing the candidate of their choice.” Roosevelt proposes that we do away with that institution and attempt a national enterprise to atone for our original sin through targeted investment in Black and other marginalized communities, which “offers the possibility of a real transformation.” His argument is sometimes repetitive but compelling and well worth consideration.
A novel way of reading our founding documents and revising them as both law- and nation-building myths.Pub Date: April 22, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-226-81761-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Univ. of Chicago
Review Posted Online: Jan. 24, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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